Inconsistent lightmaps for modular pieces

l1kel1ke

Hey guys, I've been looking around for solutions to this issue, but I haven't been able to find a way to fix it. I've redone my lightmap UVs a few times to test it out, fiddled with lightmass settings, and increased the resolution of the lightmaps pretty high, but I keep getting different shades of grey on each adjacent object.

(this is at lightmap res set to 64, the issue isn't fixed with 128..256 etc.)


here is the unwrap I'm using for the lightmap (for the floor tiles). I had it more tightly packed in a 32x32, but I'm still getting the issue with all of this extra padding:

cptSwing

Have you rotated your floorplanes? I think it's related to the direction of the normal maps (try searching the UDK subforum for threads related to this )

l1kel1ke

hmm, do you mean in relation to each other? if so, they're all facing the same direction. I'll look around more just in case as well

cptSwing

Yeah. Rotating them by 90 degrees for instance, to break tiling. It'll break lightmaps as well, from what I remember.

l1kel1ke

I definitely kept them all facing the same direction, so I can't see why it's broken. its present in the lightmaps of the walls as well, though not as badly as the floor, oddly enough.

Sean VanGorder

There's really no actual fix for this, unfortunately, it's just the nature of lightmass. Instead of tiling one small mesh over and over again, just build bigger meshes where you need them. You can also use other meshes to hide seams, like columns between flat wall pieces. As you work with UDK more and more you'll begin to naturally judge how to build meshes to work with lightmass.

l1kel1ke

ahh I see, thanks! I'll play around with the size/texture space then.

I've looked around on other threads, and it seems baking lightmaps in production quality helps ameliorate the situation as well (I tried it, and it does make it much less noticeable). Just edited with this in case this thread turns up in search for someone having the same issue

shabba

I would maybe consider trying to bring your UV shells off the borders of 0-1 space. All the lightmaps/shadowmaps are stitched in large atlas', so having them off the borders will hopefully guarantee you arent seeing any edge bleeds from one to the next. So scale your shells down a bit, and bring them off the 0-1 borders and see if that works.

Here is a quick example after baking lights with default template scene lightmass, using overly simple geo.